Shanghai: The Latest Architecture and News

Either as singular outcroppings or as part of a bustling center, skyscrapers are neck-craning icons across major city centers in the world. A modern trope of extreme success and wealth, the skyscraper has become an architectural symbol for vibrant urban hubs and commercial powerhouses dominating cities like New York, Dubai, and Singapore.

While skyscrapers are omnipresent, 2018 introduced new approaches, technologies, and locations to the high-rise typology. From variations in materiality to form, designs for towers have started to address aspects beyond simply efficiency and height, proposing new ways for the repetitive form to bring unique qualities to city skylines. Below, a few examples of proposals and trends from 2018 that showcase the innovative ideas at work: 

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Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) has unveiled details of Huamu Lot 10 in Shanghai. The three-tower scheme, totaling 279,000 square meters, is dedicated to commercial offices and a future museum, positioned around a central grand plaza.

Described as a “new form of participatory urbanism,” the scheme has been designed to accommodate large-scale artwork in a public setting, thus activating the central plaza as a cultural hub.

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Sergei Tchoban: Drawing Buildings/Building Drawings

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Iranian architect and concept designer Nasim Sehat has developed an alternative living module driven by adaptability for the gig economy. SLICE is described as a “sustainable, people centric, connected, self-contained, and flexible plug’n-play urban solution” targeted at future city dwellers.

SLICE consists of a layered module of functional plugins, combined to create basic spatial configurations. In tandem with the design of SLICE’s spatial profile, Shanghai-based Sehat has proposed a shared, on-demand digital service for module rental, maintenance, and payment.

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